The Truth Is Over There

By Neil Gordon

Published: July 31, 2005

CHINUA ACHEBE'S challenge to Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness'' -- asking whether a novel that ''depersonalizes a portion of the human race can be called a great work of art'' -- is a particularly powerful example of a basic literary question. Can fiction that falsifies the nature of our reality have a meaningful artistic existence? From stream-of-consciousness monologues to noir thrillers, the work of innovative writers (''inventors,'' in Ezra Pound's formulation) brings back a fresh depiction of the world. But with their commercial cynicism or self-conscious style, failed novelists (''diluters,'' according to Pound) manage only to distort.

This is the issue at stake in Carl Shuker's first novel, an ensemble piece that jumps back and forth in time, point of view and tense, swimming deeply into its characters' consciousness, then out into cultural critique. Brash and fearless, ''The Method Actors'' is a self-consciously postmodern challenge to our perceived reality and its fictional depiction. But the question on which the book's success hinges is much older and simpler: does the formal ingenuity of its composition provide new insight or is it just an exercise in literary technique?

Shuker's basic plot concerns the disappearance from modern-day Tokyo of Michael Edwards, a young historian specializing in war crimes, and his sister's attempts to find him. Other story lines present other characters tangentially involved in that search: Yasu, a cultivator of magic mushrooms (apparently the drug of choice for East Asia's Generation X); Simon, the son of an international restaurateur; Catherine, Michael's abandoned lover, whom we know almost exclusively through successive drafts of a paper she's writing on Shakespeare. Various friends, lovers and acquaintances of these characters also wander into the action, exposing us to their perceptions and memories as the complex, multilayered reality of the book unfolds. ''I lived in Tokyo for eight months,'' Simon tells us. ''It moved quickly, and now there is a disassociated quality to it all, like a dream in which I can't remember myself as a character, like a movie with no sound. I tried, soon after I returned, just once, to explain the feeling to someone back in L.A. . . . It's like, everything you learn outside Tokyo is useless in Tokyo. Everything you learn in Tokyo is useless outside Tokyo.''

With the exception of Yasu, the characters are young foreigners, prodigiously precocious in their tastes and appetites, navigating the opportunities for mind-altering adventure in a city -- ''America's deformed little cyberbaby,'' one character calls it -- so complex and contradictory that exploring it can be a full-time occupation. Or so it seems to them. Doubtless they'd like to be known as expatriates, but they read more convincingly as senior-year-abroad tourists, afflicted with adolescent anomie: ''The usual trajectory is they come to Tokyo looking for other selves, and only later do they begin to look for other people, whom they'll somehow magically find those other selves within.''

In controlled and erudite prose, Shuker takes these characters wherever his curiosity leads him: from mycology to Japanese history, Nietzsche to ''The X-Files.'' There are deeply personal reflections here, as well as broader recollections, jazzy stream-of-consciousness riffs, even sketches of maps scrawled on napkins in bars. There's a great deal of intimately described sex, and there's family history, accompanied by observations and digressions on almost everything under the sun.

At his best, however, Shuker is less investigative than descriptive. He lets his eye wander over anything -- a naked body, the anonymous expanses of an airport -- with equal patience and attention to detail. Virtually every one of his book's 500 pages has something worth lingering over, but many of the best passages are reserved for the cityscapes, which have an intensity reminiscent of William Gibson's visions of the gritty cybernetic future:

''Opposite, on the Tsutaya building, a TV four or five stories high is playing a Microsoft advertisement and in the dimming twilight the TV is lighting up the faces of the crowds in flickers, shining on a thousand heads of black hair. The air is thick and hot, radiating up from the concrete, and the traffic is roaring and the advertisement has changed to a video for the new Hitomi single and while I have been waiting here . . . I have seen a homeless man dragged past me by two uniformed Tobu department store staff to the police koban, protesting mildly, flapping his hands, some fluid leaking out of his pants, leaving a trail of wet on the concrete all the way back to Tobu, but it's so hot and there are so many people the fluid has already mostly evaporated or been tramped inside Shibuya station.''

ALL this stylistic intricacy is certainly appealing, but is it more than merely ingenious? Michael's obsession with war crimes is presumably meant as a moral anchor for this fictional universe. But Michael -- perhaps internalizing the fractured nature of the narrative -- is unable to arrive at any durable historical or moral insight, which may be the reason for his disappearance. ''If you're not confused,'' he says at one point, ''you're not trying hard enough.'' Well, maybe. Here he sounds more like a grad student at a lecture on Derrida than a genuinely engaged historian.

A novel can explain a philosophical argument or it can dramatize it. In other words, a novel can make you think about something or make you experience it. (And sometimes, on rare occasions, it can do both.) Shuker's actors may not have completely mastered the Method: for much of the novel, they make you think but not feel. Despite its fascinations, this ambitious, often brilliant novel told me too much about itself and too little about the reality we all struggle to understand.